XML Streaming

Web services are getting over the age of hacks and proof of concept, products are getting serious about interoperability and performance, they are starting to get used in production environments. So, people expect them to work well with the rest of today's computer applications.

Having database tables bigger than physical memory is not uncommon. Why sending an 1 KB or 10 MB messages works but not a 1 GB message? Are there projects that need to send this kind of messages? I would argue that most of the projects would do fine with a 10 MB limit but there are cases that are important that go well over that limit.

So what's the solution? Maybe projects that need this kind of functionality need to adopt a different paradigm. Is writing your XML application over a streaming API the right answer?